Micro Marketing For Big Organizations

When you use the Internet well, you may never see clients face-to-face. In fact, it can be more efficient not to, although the personal contact helps with initial negotiations.

I’ve been interviewing customers on the phone and writing case studies for a data storage system vendor. When I finish recording an interview with my digital recorder, I upload it to the project site on www.basecamphq.com for the transcriptionist to work on. When she’s done, she notifies me of the uploaded transcription. I download it, write a draft, and upload that to the project site for my client.

The editor calls and we discuss revisions on the phone. Sometimes there aren’t any, but if there are, I make the ones we work out. Then I upload the second draft for the client to read, and the client uploads his edit request. I make those edits, upload the final draft, and the client takes it for publication.

The whole process goes a lot more quickly than even email submission would.

I don’t recommend rush jobs based on this, but I’ve been turning around 1,000 word case studies in a week or less from interview to final draft. Most of that time depends on the work load of the transcriptionist, the editor, and the client.

Some people have reported problems using basecamphq.com with large group projects where they do everything online - and I mean everything: to-do lists, task reminders,  searching large hierarchical project files. For a smaller project and team, it seems to work fine.

I never trust any online data repository completely, so I always have local copies of my own work. And so do my other teammates. With the very linear project flow from one of us to the other, it works fine.